Baroque dancer Paige Whitley-Bauguess interprets, recreates, and performs Baroque theatre dance in venues all over the world as a soloist and with her dance partner Thomas Baird.

During 2008, Paige will be performing in Calgary and Chicago with Thomas Baird and Chatham Baroque; in Tokyo with Yasuko Hamanaka, Thomas Baird, and Barry Bauguess; and in Raleigh with Mallarmé. She will also be the Stage Director, Choreographer, and Lead Dancer for the Bloomington Early Music Festival opera in May, Alessandro Scarlatti's Tigrane, and return to teach at Oberlin's Baroque Performance Institute (week 2) in late June. At the Magnolia Baroque Festival in June, Thomas and Paige will choreograph and perform semi-staged scenes from Purcell's King Arthur, Dioclesian, and The Fairy Queen. Members of the New Bern Dancing Assembly will join them for the Purcell scenes. (Go to Schedule for dates.)

In 2005-2006 Paige appeared with Andrew Lawrence-King as Guest Artist with the Portland Baroque Orchestra, served as Guest Stage Director and Choreographer at the Peabody Conservatory for Pastorale & Masque - Miniature Masterpieces from the Dawn of Opera (see Pastorale & Masque photos here), and Stage Directed Mozart's Il re pastore at East Carolina University. In 2004, she directed ECU's production of Handel's Acis et Galatea.

Paige lives in the 18th-century town New Bern, NC, where she teaches historical dance and ballet, co-directs the Baroque Arts Project with Baroque Trumpeter and husband Barry Bauguess, and directs two historical social dance troupes (youth and adult). She has produced two Baroque Dance DVDs, Introduction to Baroque Dance-Dance Types, funded in part by an NC Choreographer's Fellowship, and Dance of the French Baroque Theatre, released in July 2005. She also publishes Dance Music of the French Baroque, performing editions of music to accompany notated dances.

For fifteen years Paige has collaborated with dance partner Thomas Baird! Prior to teaming up, they were both members of the New York Baroque Dance Company, then under the co-direction of Catherine Turocy and Ann Jacoby.

The duo's critically acclaimed collaborations have excited and educated audiences in the US, Canada, and Japan, garnering repeat invitations for the duo to work with some of the finest Baroque music groups in the world. Highlights include repeat concerts with the Little Orchestra Society at Lincoln Center and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra of Vancouver, their reconstruction of the courtly entertainment Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos in Tokyo and Shizuoka, Japan, and Bailles e Danzas, a program they created especially for performances with Chatham Baroque. Last season they returned to Japan for performances with Yasuko Hamanaka, performed at the 2006 Magnolia Baroque Festival, and performed at the 2006 Madison Early Music Festival with Chatham Baroque.

As a master teacher, Paige is on the faculty of The East Coast Baroque Dance Workshop at Rutgers and has given masterclasses and lectures at numerous universities, conservatories, and museums in Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, and the United States. From 1992-98 she was on the faculty of the Stanford Baroque Dance Workshop under the direction of Wendy Hilton and from 1991 to 2001, she owned Down East Dance, a dance school in New Bern, NC. Prior to serving as the Craven Community College Visiting Artist from 1989 to 1991, she directed the Pre-Professional Dance Program at the NC School of the Arts.